It will be the actress’ first feature-length movie project as director after impressing audiences with roles in Melancholia and Fargo recently.

Dakota Fanning will play lead character Esther Greenwood, a New York magazine intern who finds herself drawn into a spiral of depression while reflecting on her younger years and wishing for a more fulfilling life.

Dakota Fanning will play the lead in the movie (Picture: Samuel Goldwyn Films)

The Bell Jar was poet Plath’s only novel and was published under a pseudonym in 1963, a month after her suicide.

The book is thought to be one of the great feminist literary works of the 20th century but a previous film version, made in 1979, was panned by critics.

Plath in the 1950s, around the time she herself was a magazine intern at Mademoiselle (Picture: CSU Archv/Everett/REX/Shutterstock)

This could be a daunting project for a first-time director, but Dunst is familiar with subject matters like clinical depression – having played a less-than-happy bride in Lars von Trier’s Melancholia.

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Her star-making vehicle was Sofia Coppola’s The Virgin Suicides, which came out in 1999 – and featured Dunst as a depressed teenager in a Christian household, who makes a suicide pact with her sisters.

Dunst played a mysterious teenage girl in The Virgin Suicides (Picture: Paramount)

In real life, the 34-year-old has also experienced the less-than-pleasant trappings being a woman – particularly the sexist attitudes of those looking to exploit her during her career.

She claims she was pressured by her team of representatives to do a topless photo shoot for Maxim when she was 18.

‘I was too young, I didn’t like it…Not good,’ she said last year. ‘Then I got a whole new team of people!’

The actress playing Lux Lisbon as an 18-year-old (Picture: Paramount)

After wowing critics in The Virgin Suicides, Dunst starred in another Coppola film, Marie Antoinette, in 2006. Clearly working with such an excellent female director put fire in Kirsten’s belly.

Having directed two short films – Welcome and Bastard – Dunst has penned this feature-length adaptation with Nellie Kim and is not expected to be acting in it herself.